64% of Super Bowl Ads Promoted their Website

What a football game! While it was not a high scoring game, Super Bowl XLLI was close throughout all four quarters and turned out a truly unbelievable ending. Sorry Patriots fans, but the Giants winning the Super Bowl and beating what was the undefeated Patriots is one of the best thing to happen in this country in awhile. It may just come right behind 2008 being the year we're finally going to elect a new President.

Anyhow, my initial opinion and from what comments I've read so far today, the NFL did a much better job than the advertisers. Yes there were a few good ads but also some pretty lame ones. There will be many different personal opinions regarding who liked what, and there should be since we're talking about an audience of over 90 million people. But all in all not many that will be remembered by next year's Super Bowl.

In my last post I wrote about the Super Bowl ads and how well they were integrating offline with online promotions. I drew from MediaPost's Joshua Stylman who pointed out that nearly one in five ads in last year's Super Bowl failed to include a URL and 90% of them lacked any call-to-action! So, my prediction for this year was that we'd see URL's in close to 90%, if not all of them and that half would have some type of call to action.

So I reviewed all the ads this morning which I watched from Advertising Age's site. Here's what I came up with...of the 50 national TV spots that ran during the actual game time, 32 included URL's at the end. That's only 64%, not the 90% that I guessed we'd have, but it's sure much more than last year. Surprisingly the big brands were the ones that didn't include their URL addresses. Could that be that they're big enough that they don't need to or care to? Or do they still just don't get it?

Anheuser-Busch was the largest advertiser with seven different spots, all but one for Bud Light. Now with seven spots you'd at least have to end up with one or two on the top favorite lists today. I've read some reviews that really liked the Fire ad. That one was pretty clever and one of my favs. Others, mostly Will Ferrell fans, loved his spot and I'm sure we'll hear the "suck one" phrase being repeated for awhile. But why didn't A-B at least end their spots with www.budbowl.com? Visitors could go to the website during the game and vote on which of A-B's Super Bowl ads they liked the most. Today the site shows the voter's choice being the Clydesdale Team ad. It was the only one of theirs that pulled on the heartstrings.

Coca-Cola was the other major advertiser that didn't include any URL's. They had three TV spots, two for Coke and one for Vitamin Water. The Coke spot with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons fighting over the Coke bottle balloon was clever and emotionally sweet, but it didn't make me want a Coke. I think they could have done a lot more with that storyline and extended it online. If you visit the Vitamin Water website you are invited to "Horse around with Shaq" where you are redirected to a MySpace Interactive Promotions page where you can watch the ad again, play the interactive game "Race in the Shaq Derby", download a widget, upload your photo and become a jockey in "Put on your Racing Face". They've got lots of fun, interactive stuff here that they should have promoted more. 

Pepsi-Cola was the second largest advertiser with a total of four TV spots. They are split with two spots having a URL address and two not. The Pepsi Stuff promotion I've already written about in an earlier post which used the Justin Timberlake ad to drive people to the PepsiStuff website. The spot they ran for SoBe Life Water ended with www.Thrillicious.com where you can engage more with the So Be Lizards.

Pepsi didn't include a URL address for the Diet Pepsi Max which I was surprised by. The other was the "Bob's House" ad which will probably be the most memorable ad since it was the first time a brand recognized the deaf community in a national TV spot, much less on the Super Bowl. There was no sound during the 60-second ad just sign language which was captioned. I live in Rochester, NY which is home to RIT's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, so we have a pretty huge deaf community here. The spot includes Darren Therriault, an NTID graduate and Wayne Betts Jr., another alumni who was a production assistant. To see the commercial and a “making of” the video, visit www.pepsi.com/bobshouse , but they didn't bother to include this info at the end of the spot. Too bad.

The other non-URL ads were P&G's Tide Stain, Gatorade's Jeter, GM's Why Push?, McDonald's Ronald McDonald's House, Hershey's Ice Breakers and Victoria's Secret. At least you'd think Victoria's Secret would have sent guys online to shop for the women in their lives or if they don't have one at the moment, to look at the VC Models! Gatorade's site today is congratulating the NY Giants and Eli Manning and offering a limited edition NY Giants Super Bowl XXLII bottle. TIde actually has the My Talking Stain website where you can play Be the Stain Instant Win Game and also a consumer-generated content contest where you can upload your own stain ad.

GoDaddy.com was probably the most successful at integrating the web with their TV spot. Their server must have been prepared for a mad rush to their website to view race-car driver Danica Patrick's "Exposure" ad. Too bad it was for such a sexist ad. I already mentioned the Pepsi Stuff online promotion, as well as Unilever's Sunsilk Life Can't Wait contest. SalesGenie.com had an interesting offer. While I wasn't crazy about their two ads, both offered 100 free sales leads by visiting salesgenie.com/tv. Toshiba also had a offer advertising their HD-DVD  player for $149 and listing the participating retailers.

BTW - The winner of the Dorito's "Crash the Super Bowl" online contest was announced by airing the winning music video created by 22 year old Kina Grannis from Austin, TX singing “Message  From Your Heart. Good luck Kina. She definitely has some talent. 

Reprise Media just released preliminary results that show how well these advertisers integrated search engines and social media into their mix. So, check it out. All in all promotions and the web played a much bigger role with this year's Super Bowl advertising than in the past. However, I'm still surprised that it didn't play an even larger role. Hey, there's always next year - and maybe, just maybe the Buffalo Bills will make it to at least the playoffs! You know they still hold the record for the only team that's made it to the Super Bowl four years in a row! Unfortunately they didn't win the championship in any of them.

One last note - Thank god we didn't see any KFC Hot Wings Chicken Dances.

Comments

[Miguel C.]

Hey Donna, thanks for the the shout out about our study. I'm glad to hear it was helpful. We'll be releasing a much more in depth white paper at the Online Marketing Summit (Feb. 22), I'll make sure you get a copy.

Also, Joshua Stylman is actually the managing partner of my firm, Reprise Media. He sometimes contributes to MediaPost, however. Just an FYI. :)

Thanks again for the support and I'll be sure to continue reading your blog.

[Donna DeClemente]

Thanks again Miguel for the info and I'm looking forward to getting a copy of the white paper. I didn't know of the connection between Joshua and Reprise, so thanks for the heads up. I hope Joshua enjoyed the mention as well.

[Sara]

Hello Donna. Great blog and very informative. The Super Bowl wasn't exciting until the 4th quarter but I did enjoy the commercials. I commend Pepsi with their deaf commercial and think it's wonderful they are creating such great awareness about the community. Here is a link to some webisodes of Bob's House in case you are interested. I thought they were pretty funny. Enjoy! http://my.break.com/content/view.aspx?ContentID=442998

[Donna DeClemente]

Thanks Sara for the link to the webisodes. I too agree that it was great to see a brand as big as Pepsi be the first to acknowledge the deaf community and do it in such a fun way. Glad you're enjoying my blog.